Charles Lee

Opportunity for automation After a 7-year hiatus, I recently started folding origami again and decided to focus on tessellations and modulars. I used to fold mostly representational models, i.e. animals and humans, and wanted to explore some new areas. Luckily for me, origami advanced greatly while I was away and the first good books on tessellations1 and wireframe modulars2 were published by Eric Gjerde and Byriah Loper, respectively. I bought both books, dove straight into making models, and immediately found myself repeating the same steps hundreds of times.

Back in March 2017, I posted about passing the Certified Bitcoin Professional (CBP) exam by C4. I did this partly out of curiosity and partly hoping it would help in a job search for crypto roles. My curiosity was satisfied, my wallet \$73 lighter, and no employers seemed to care. Not surprisingly, what did help during my job search were my understanding of Bitcoin and my crypto sideprojects.
There is a more technical CBX (Certified Bitcoin Expert) exam intended for developers that looks promising: it covers the API and scripting.

Random beacons A random beacon is “a trusted service that broadcasts fresh random numbers at regular intervals”. Random beacons are useful in situations that demand security against manipulation, e.g. choosing precincts to audit after an election. Several beacon services currently exist, notably Random.org and the NIST beacon, however there are several advantages to using the Bitcoin blockchain as a source of randomness:
Publicly verifiable Bitcoin blocks are public as soon as they are mined so anyone can perform and verify the beacon computations.

The Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Coursera is an 11-week, 4-lecturer collaboration that gives the student an overview of the existing cryptocurrency environment and how it came to be. It begins with a history of cryptocurrency advancements leading up to Bitcoin, then goes into the technical details of how Bitcoin works, moves on to the societal impact of cryptocurrencies, and finally ends with a discussion of future developments and their feasibility.

What is this? The Crypto Currency Certification Consortium (C4) is a non-profit organization that issues Bitcoin certifications. Currently, the only certification they offer is the Certified Bitcoin Professional (CBP), though a more advanced version, the Certified Bitcoin Expert (CBX), is being developed. Given Bitcoin’s decentralized nature, there can be no official certifying authority – anyone can issue anything. In this environment, the only thing that carries weight is reputation, and C4 has a solid roster on their board and advisors, including Andreas M.

Steem for the people When someone writes a great post on Reddit that goes viral and is widely shared, the party that benefits most is Reddit itself. Realizing this and wanting to give back to the community responsible for its success, Reddit toyed with the idea of giving shares of the company to users in the form of a cryptocurrency. This plan was later put on indefinite hold.
Steem is the embodiment of what Reddit wanted to achieve – a blockchain-based, social news platform where posters and upvoters, i.

It’s 11:30pm and I’m in the family kitchen by myself munching on a box of palmiers1 with a glass of milk and it dawns on me that I feel uncharacteristically good. I feel safe, calm, clear-headed, and full of food.
Thinking back to my pre-holiday rush to close out everything before 2017, I was over-whelmed, anxious, and really not that productive. With a list of 2017 priorities in front of me, I start planning out the first few months of 2017 and it’s soon obvious there’s no way I can do all of this.

Introduction This post is about my experience with the Uberman (UM) sleep schedule, the popularized and extreme polyphasic sleep schedule that achieves 2-3 hours of total daily sleep through periodic 20 minutes naps. The benefits are enticing. Assuming you currently sleep 8 hours/day and follow the 3 hours/day schedule, you can have 21 more hours a week to enjoy and to get stuff done. With all that extra time, surely I’d be able to get through my to-do backlog!